Tectonics, volcanism, landscape structure
and human evolution in the African Rift
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Title of host publication | Human Ecodynamics |
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Date | Published - 2000 |
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Pages | 31-46 |
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Number of pages | 15 |
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Publisher | Oxbow Books |
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Original language | English |
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ISBN (Print) | 1842170015 |
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Name | Symposia of the Association for Environmental Archaeology |
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Publisher | Oxbow Books |
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Volume | 19 |
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Tectonic movements and volcanism in the African Rift have usually been considered of relevance to
human evolution only at very large geographical and chronological scales, principally in relation to longterm
topographic and climatic variation at the continental scale. At the more loca1 scale of catchment
basins and individual sites, tectonic features are generally considered to be at worst disruptive and at best
incidental features enhancing the preservation and exposure of early sites. We demonstrate that recent
lava flows and fault scarps in a tectonically active region create a distinctive landscape structure with a
complex and highly differentiated topography of enclosures, barriers and fertile basins. This landscape
structure has an important potential impact on the co-evolution of prey-predator interactions and on
interspecific relationships more generally. In particular, we suggest that it would have offered unique
opportunities for the development of a hominid niche characterised by bipedalism, meat-eating and stone
tool use. These landscape features are best appreciated by looking at areas which today have rapid rates
of tectonic movement and frequent volcanic activity, as in eastern Afar and Djibouti. These provide a
better analogy for the Plio-Pleistocene environments occupied by early hominids than the present-day
landscapes where their fossil remains and artefacts have been discovered. The latter areas are now less
active than was the case when the sites were formed. They have also been radically transfomed by
ongoing geomorphological processes in the intervening millennia. Thus, previous attempts to reconstruct
the local landscape setting adjacent to these early hominid sites necessarily rely on limited geological
windows into the ancient land surface and thus tend to filter out small-scale topographic detail because
it cannot be reliably identified. It is precisely this local detail that we consider to be of importance in
understanding the environmental contribution to co-evolutionary developments.
Reproduced with permission.
- normal faulting, lava flows, Afar, African Rift, hominids
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